Apples and oranges?
Some newspapers inflate their circulation numbers based on the idea that you’re going to read your copy and hand it on to another reader. Conversely there’s a downplaying of statistics for online news sites. Amy Gahran picks up where Dan Thornton starts and runs with it:
Thornton suggests that if your newspaper factors shared readership into your print circulation, then to be fair you should also try to estimate how many people encounter your online news without ever logging into your site as a visitor. This includes people who:
- Block cookies
- Use a feed reader or personal home page (like MyYahoo)
- Get news or headlines via social media or news aggregators
- Access mobile or cached versions of your news (which often aren’t estimated adequately)
- Read reposts of news stories elsewhere online
According to Thornton, “There’s a big elephant in the news room. Whoever said that print newspaper readers were guaranteed to only be getting their online news from newspapers?”
Therefore: If you think your online readership (as estimated by direct Web site traffic) only represents only a small percentage of your estimated print circulation — think again. When considering the future of your business, how many people visit your site ultimately may be less relevant than how many people connect with your news content and brand via any online or mobile channel.
There’s a great distributed network of people out there just beyond the individuals reading your stuff. How might they pass it along? Who might you be influencing because of it? From the business perspective the key, as Gahran says, is in recognizing the opportunities in a broader view, and communicating that value effectively to advertisers and other potential partners.
Note: Cross posted from my JMC 352 blog.
